We’ve all been bombarded with information, notions, guesses, photos, hopes, and fears about the new pope over the last forty-eight hours. Indeed, 50 hours ago (at least at the time of this writing), hardly anyone in the United States or in most parts of the world knew anything about the man who was to become Pope Francis. Some of the responses–at least on social networks–have been bizarre, to state the least. Lots of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” type posts. Poor Pete Townshend. Lots of extreme anti-Catholicism has emerged as well, though usually disguised as righteous indignation or cautious humor.

Others have been downright offensive. “Look, they couldn’t really pick a non-European. They just picked an Argentine-Italian.” These folks who probably consider themselves non-racist are, frankly, as bigoted and as racist as any alive to base an opinion–pro or con–on the ethnicity of a person. This is the point where I thank the good Lord for the Dominican nuns who educated me and taught me a person is a person is a person. Amen–neither Greek nor Jew, neither male nor female. All one.

Some posts have merely been prickly, especially about the new pope’s designation. “He can’t be Pope Francis I, as there is not yet Pope Francis II.” We’ll, ok, technically this is correct. But, I for one am glad I first heard his name as Pope Francis I, as I had no idea that no other pope had ever taken that name. It’s my confirmation name, so I’m especially happy.

Most Catholics, though, seem rather happy, and we are certainly willing to give him the benefit of any doubt and we hope with hope against all ills in the papacy and the Church universal. After all, we pray, the Holy Spirit did guide the hands of the vote.

Two things that many good Catholics have stated have troubled me deeply, however. Here’s been the standard line: “Well, he’s neither left nor right, but he believes strongly in social justice.”

First, the Pope can be neither left nor right. In fact, no Catholic can be left or right. It’s quite possible and very probable that no left or right even exists. Two of our greatest Catholic thinkers over the past century, Christopher Dawson and Russell Kirk, noted time and again that the left-right divide is truly a propagandistic means employed by ideologues to divide humanity against humanity. “The tactics of totalitarianism are to weld every difference of opinion and tradition. . . into an absolute ideological opposition which disintegrates society into hostile factions bent on destroying one another.” The result, Dawson rightly argued, was nothing but the dehumanization of the person, resulting in bloodshed, destruction, and death.

After all, by stressing that one is left or right, we allow the sphere of politics to intrude too much into parts of life that should never be political or have been allowed to have become politicized in the first place. A man, by his nature, is certainly a political being. But, he or she is also so very much more than this. The curse of the last 100 years has been politicization of everything under the sun, and every form of politics has proven imperial in its unhealthy desire to spread its cancer.

In reality, as Dawson and Kirk understood it, there is ultimately only man and anti-man, God and anti-God. The divide is neither left nor right (horizontal), but transcendent or not (vertical).

Finally, we use the term “social justice” at our own peril. There is no such thing as social justice. If we properly understand justice as a virtue, we must define it properly and recognize that it is an objective and transcendent ideal, well beyond the reach of human manipulation. That is, justice cannot be modified by whim, logic, or tradition. It is what it is. We can ignore it, mock it, or forget it. But, it remains, only to be remembered and, if we are so blessed by God’s grace, to reign in the small and the large, the things of this world.

As the ancients understood it and as the Church has embraced and sanctified it, justice properly means “to give each person his or her due.”

When most–including well meaning Catholics–employ this term “social justice,” they mean very importantly the helping of the poor and a deep search for equality. Yet, justice demands inequality, as it must recognize that each person brings unique gifts to the community of the moment and to the temporally expansive Body of Christ (Romans 12; 1 Cor 13).

What most mean by social justice is actually the virtue of charity (love), the highest of all virtues and that, as Josef Pieper reminded us, which ties the other six cardinal and Christian virtues together. Prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and charity.

I realize this post might seem excessively picky and pedantic. For this, I apologize. But, I also believe that we must employ the proper terms for the proper things and define them to the best of our ability.

Just as politics has proven imperial, so language has succumbed to the propagandistic elements of the political, meaning manipulated for earthly gain. We must remember, though, the first commands to Adam: to name things and to have stewardship over the created order. Language matters, and we have not yet entered into a no-return world of Doublethink. Justice is justice, and charity is charity. They are certainly related to one another, but they are not the same.

When the manipulative manipulate, I’m not surprised. But, when good Catholics buy into such manipulation, innocently adopting the language of the ideologues and others of unlimited ambition, I worry.

Most importantly, all seven virtues are so far beyond a left-right spectrum that we must–imperatively–transcend the limitations of our present infatuation with the political world.

Heaven is not the Oval Office, U.S. Senate, or Fox News. Eternity is the eighth day, well beyond the comprehension of any one of us, unmerited by a single one of us, and offered only as a gratuitous gift of grace.

]]>http://www.catholicvote.org/neither-left-nor-right-greek-nor-jew-male-nor-female/feed/8Um, LCWR, a “Futurist” may not have been the best choice.http://www.catholicvote.org/um-lcwr-a-futurist-may-not-have-been-the-best-choice/
http://www.catholicvote.org/um-lcwr-a-futurist-may-not-have-been-the-best-choice/#commentsThu, 09 Aug 2012 03:05:52 +0000http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=34274National Catholic Register’s guest blogger Ann Carey reports that Most Reverend Robert Carlson, archbishop of St. Louis, a fine, fine bishop, gave a “warm welcome” to the sisters at the assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, encouraging them to figure out how to respond well to the doctrinal assessment handed down by the Vatican.

And then this happened:

In the first open session, the featured speaker, futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, was led through the assembly hall at the Millennium Hotel by several sisters who were waving orange scarves draped over their arms.

Once on the stage, the sisters moved in a circle around Hubbard as they raised and lowered the scarves and the assembly was asked to extend their hands in blessing while singing, “Spirit of vision, Spirit of life! Spirit of courage, be with her now! Wisdom and Truth be on her lips!”

Hubbard is an engaging speaker, and she knew how to connect with her audience, though the futurist terminology she used left this journalist reaching for a dictionary to look up “noosphere,” “cosmo genesis,” synergistic convergence” and “Christification.”
Hubbard believes that we are at a critical time in humanity, a “tipping point” that will lead to either breakdown or evolutionary breakthrough. She made vague references throughout her talk to the “crisis” the LCWR was facing and encouraged the members by saying that breakthroughs often happen only after chaos or crisis. Furthermore, she proclaimed, the LCWR members were just the kind of people to lead humanity to this breakthrough because of their “evolutionary capacities” that had guided the organization over the past 40 years.

“So my conclusion is that you are the best seedbed I know for evolving the Church and the world in the 21st century,” Hubbard said.

“Almost all structures are top down,” Hubbard continued, giving the examples of nations, states, organized religions and corporations. “So what is needed today,” she continued, “is a radical reform of existing institutions from their top-down version.”

Sometimes a facepalm is the best first reaction.

“Futurist.” Orange scarves. Chant circles. “Evolving the Church.”?

(Aside: Orange? Orange isn’t even a liturgical color! What good could those possibly do?)

For kicks, check out the insight and long-sightedness of she whom the LCWR values:

By 2012…we can have through the internet a synergy engine that will connect what’s created, in every field and function, if you can see it as a wheel of co-creation, and when that creativity comes together, we’ll see that we have the capacity to feed, to house, to clothe, to have the energy we need, and to begin our future as a global, co-creative, and eventually universal species in a universe undoubtedly filled with life our crisis is the birth of a universal humanity.

This video is from 2010. By the end of 2012, eh? “Utopia” really is an alluring concept. And it really does mean “No place.”

But back to the LCWR conference: Carey won’t be able to report about the executive sessions—media has been explicitly excluded (marked out by the loud green name tags. No word on whether they have to ring bells while walking the halls shouting “unclean!”) along with any sisters who consider “confidentiality” to include “I can talk about this with the media”—but if this display and Marx Hubbard’s exhortation for this great “seedbed” to “evolve the Church” amidst Orange Power is any indication, I think the Vatican has a better chance of getting a positive response from the Society of St. Pius the X. They may be cranks, but at least they have good liturgy.

I do, of course, hope I am proven wrong and the Holy Spirit moves in their hearts to, as a priest once thundered about the Jesuits from a pulpit in the diocese of Arlington on the feast of St. Philip Neri, “get over their infantile rebellion and become, once more, Catholic!”

Because we need them. All of them: the sisters, the SSPXers, the Jesuits. We need all hands on deck for what’s coming. That’s my futurist statement.

]]>http://www.catholicvote.org/um-lcwr-a-futurist-may-not-have-been-the-best-choice/feed/9New Proofs for God’s Existencehttp://www.catholicvote.org/new-proofs-for-gods-existence/
http://www.catholicvote.org/new-proofs-for-gods-existence/#commentsFri, 08 Jul 2011 22:38:36 +0000http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=18787This week The Gregorianwent to press with a challenging but necessary lecture by Father Robert Spitzer, S.J.

Argumentative atheism is experiencing a resurgence. And Father Robert Spitzer is one reason why that is not necessarily a bad thing.

We have experienced at least three different forms of atheist resurgence in the past century. One was the literally militant atheism that reached its peak in totalitarian regimes in the middle of the 20th century. Expressions of faith in God were criminalized and adherents were persecuted; this form of atheism decimated the ranks of the faithful by violence and fear.

A second form of atheism is the apathetic agnosticism that has prevailed in much of the Western hemisphere and in America to this day. In apathetic agnostic societies, religion is fine as long as it remains a private eccentricity. But to mention God at a social gathering is a faux pas, and to mention him seriously in a business meeting is unthinkable. This form of atheism may have been even more destructive to faith.

A third form of atheism is argumentative atheism. This was the form of atheism that prevailed in the world of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was an atheism that didn’t seek to destroy believers, but passionately sought to dissuade them. Questions about God were bandied about in universities and in public lectures. Poets, philosophers, novelists and playwrights all had their say.

Today’s rise in atheistic literature looks most like this third kind of atheism — but with important differences from the days when God’s existence was debated in public halls.

Back then, thinkers spoke a common language, based on rules of reason and logic that were widely shared. Today, that philosophical language — and the worldview it expressed — is lost. In its place is a scientific language and, as Cardinal Christoph Schonborn said on campus last year, “reason is bound into the narrow limits of the mathematical , or natural science and its methodology.”

Enter Father Robert Spitzer.

Think of him as a missionary to scientists. His New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Eerdmans, 2010) speaks to modern scientists in their language.

He came to Benedictine College campus fresh from the Larry King Live show and a “debate” with Stephen Hawking. Spitzer is the kind of guy who can debate Stephen Hawking.

In his speech here he addressed three questions: “First, can science give evidence of creation and supernatural design? Second, what is the evidence for a beginning of the universe and what are the implications for creation? Third, what is the evidence of supernatural intelligence from anthropic fine-tuning — the idea that the universe appears to have been intentionally constructed for intelligent life?”

The concluding sentence gives you a hint for the direction the talk goes but it has to be read to be appreciated: “Thus, it is both reasonable and responsible to believe on the basis of physics that a very powerful and intelligent being caused our universe to exist as a whole.”

To check it out, click on the link and sign up for The Gregorian … free.

Tom Hoopes is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas where he teaches in the Journalism and Mass Communications department and edits the college’s Catholic identity speech digest, The Gregorian.